Sahyadrica

A tiger crosses a river, beyond the designated Protected Area cover, in the central Indian wilderness, a rare parcel of land that is borderless, just a tad-bit careful about avoiding humans as they too amble along the same river. The process of population isolation, driven by habitat loss and fragmentation, leads to population extinctions and reduction in biological diversity (Rosenberg, Noon & Meslow, 1997). That isolated populations are significantly more prone to extinction with increasing interpopulation distance has been observed in various taxa, including insects (Saccheri et al., 1998), fishes (Magnuson et al., 1998), frogs (Sjögren, 1991), snakes (Webb, Brook & Shine, 2002), and mammals – from the small island marsupials (see Miller et al., 2011) to large carnivores such as tigers (see Sagar et al., 2021), as has been theoretically put forth by Wright (1943) in the iconic ‘isolation by distance’, and later demonstrated by MacArthur and Wilson (1967) in their treatise ‘T...

[This piece draws its roots from the previous article In Forests Trees Fall , and focuses on the trees particularly of cities with an insight into their existence; their past, present, and, if ever bleak, the future.] I faintly recall the last time I clambered up a tree to fetch a juicy fruit – it was probably more than fifteen years ago, in the heart of a wooded city which was then less a city but more than a town. When I was a kid, I was told that our co-operative housing society boasted largest number of trees of the city – indeed it did, for it was also supposedly the largest co-op housing society of Asia. It had old, really old – some over 25 year old trees; if they stood today they would be nearing their half a century of existence on this planet. Fortunately, a few still stand. And all these trees were, as I later came to realize, exotics – Gulmohar ( Deloix regia ); Copperpod ( Peltophorum pterocarpum ), Rain tree ( Albizia saman ), and Subabul ( Leucaena leucocephala ). ...